It's not capitalism's fault. It's yours. Bad choices result in a lost underclass

A discussion today on the radio got me so agitated I decided the only way to respond was via a written rant.

So here it is.

One of the people in a political discussion was claiming that violence could still be justified, even in a constitutional democracy.

This was conncect to this person's political party's recent activities at various H&M stores in South Africa, where they trashed the stores, broke the mannequins, and looted some of the clothing.

This so called 'protest action' was as a result of an ill conceived (and frankly very stupid) H&M ad campaign which showed a black child wearing a sweater with the slogan 'Coolest monkey in the jungle'.

A mistake by H&M. A big one.

But that does not give one the right to go trashing their stores!

My perspective is that, in a constitutional democracy it is illogical to argue that violence is justified in South Africa because of the shortcomings of capitalism or the apartheid past.

Ultimately it comes down to bad personal choices and economics.

For example, in a world of cheap and readily available birth control, unless a woman has been raped, then she CHOSE to allow herself to get pregnant. The man carries equal responsibility – he CHOSE to sleep with her without wearing a condom.

The inevitable result is a child that is brought into a world in which no thought has been given to the father’s level of commitment to the mother, or either of the parents’ abilities to provide the basics, like a home, food and education.

By contrast, there are many poor people who, with very limited resources have produced successful children because they first considered if they could afford to have a child, and then when they did, they made massive sacrifices to ensure the child received a good education.

Sadly, that’s not how most people think, so we have a global poverty trap into which more and more children are born in a world in which they cannot be nurtured, educated or fed.

Those children grow into the adults that now express rage not because of capitalism, but because they are excluded from that middle class world any normal child with responsible, nurturing parents could have attained if they had received an education.

Unfortunately they will remain excluded because they are un-employable. In the post-digital era in which we now live, governments no longer need a large population to provide armies. Drones and precision weapons have replaced mass armies.

Employers no longer need a large unskilled or semi-skilled labour force, because robots do the job better, faster and they don’t need leave pay, they don’t get sick and they don’t need a pension. And they work twenty-four seven, three sixty five. Increasingly in this era, the only work available will be to people with specialist skills, which can only be acquired by some form of tertiary education.

So now you have this mass of unemployable, uneducated people that the state and employers no longer need or want, but have to provide for.

In the twenty first century, regardless of one’s politics, the poor are becoming an unwanted underclass, which is becoming increasingly neglected and angry. This is not just a South African phenomenon.

It’s happening in the USA (how else did Trump got elected?), in Brasil, Argentina, the East, even in Europe.

How to deal with this 'lost' underclass, I believe, is going to become the next biggest challenge in 21st century society.